In Search of Home: Black Youth World-Making Geographies and Liberation in Teacher Education
Thu, April 11, 10:50am to 12:20pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 100, Room 104BAbstract
How can the social and educational experiences of Black youth, in a social milieu structured through a total climate antiblackness (Sharpe, 2016), inform educator preparation as a site of liberatory renewal and possibility? How can Black youth’s creative compositions (how they leverage their surroundings to continuously make and remake their identities) of themselves reveal intellectual thought that can demonstrate a pathway to world-making beyond the confines of antiblackness? Gathered from a variety of Black multi-ethnic youth’s textualities (Author 3, 2023; Cherry-McDaniel. 2017; Kirkland, 2017) and/as resistance in a critical literacy summer research project, this paper engages theorizations of antiblackness in education, Black geographies, and Black liberation to understand what liberatory knowledges reside in the everyday lives of Black youth as they work to live through and beyond the violence of antiblackness, in schools and US society. I define textualities “as the multiple literacy practices—reading, writing, speaking, aesthetics, movement styles, etc.—that represents a person’s sense making of and interaction with the world based on their direct lived experiences. The youth textualities in this study are embodied in a range of data including drawings, paintings, photography, altar making, clay sculpting, video recorded reflections, and poetry.
Building from hooks’ (1997) conceptualization of homeplace and the Black Liberation in Teacher Education (BLiTE) framework, I network Black youth’s textualities about Black being that provides insights on how to better prepare educators to engage in teaching and learning practices that disrupt anti-Black racism by creating curricular space/s that see Blackness as central to the development of Black and non-Black children in an anti-Black world. According to hooks (1997), making homeplace is “about the construction of a safe place where [B]lack people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination” (p. 384). Working to love oneself or one’s community under a culture of white supremacy can be quite the task, homeplaces (a world within and beyond the world of anti-Black violence) allows Black youth (and thusly, educators of Black youth) “to grow and develop, and nurture our spirits” (p. 384). In theorizing BLiTE elsewhere (Author 3 & Colleague, 2021), I have defined Black liberation as an “untethering from the ways white systems of dominance position Blackness as inherently deficient and backwards, achieved through leveraging 1) resistance and subversion, 2) spiritual innovation, 3) intersectionality, 4) Black fugitive thought, and 5) Afrofuturism “to culturally sustain Blackness amid ongoing antiblackness, both in schools and society” (p. 7). Through presentation and analysis of the youth’s textualities, I advance the BLiTE framework by expanding it to include youth voice as an intervention into liberatory educator preparation practices. More specifically, I expand current approaches to addressing antiblackness in Teacher Education and the field of education at-large to include the literacy lives of youth, youth voice, and their Black worldmaking (Madera, 2021; McKittrick, 2021) capacities as key tools to developing equitable schooling practices.